


This Love (Lasts Forever)

by skyclectic



Category: Super Junior
Genre: Angst, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, POV First Person, Past Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-19
Updated: 2017-11-19
Packaged: 2019-02-04 07:34:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12766170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skyclectic/pseuds/skyclectic
Summary: He sees me looking and smiles – heartbreaking and blinding like the sun. He reaches out for me and I let him pull me close for a kiss.When his lips find mine, I pray that he cannot taste your name on the corners of my lips. It will break him to know that I still cannot let go and it will kill me if his heart is broken. So where does that leave me now?





	This Love (Lasts Forever)

**Author's Note:**

> Part of the Super Junior 100 Fic Challenge. Prompt #27 Replacement (Heechul/Kibum).
> 
> Written and posted on helloparoxysm@livejournal on 6th January 2009.

I had a dream of you again last night.   
  
It’s the same dream I have every time he sleeps over.   
  
I’m in a crowd full of people, on this street with shop fronts lining each side. Only, they don’t showcase clothes or Prada bags or fancy sports equipment. Instead, every single one carefully protects a life-sized photograph.

Photographs of you and me; laughing our heads off on the spinning teacups at the theme park, building a sandcastle on the beach, walking hand in hand in the park, feeding each other ice cream. There were all like that – shrines to a love now lost.   
  
I can’t find you among the throng of people around me, jostling and pushing me until I stumble on my feet. So I yell for you, yell your name over and over and over again until my throat goes raw and I wake up in a cold sweat. 

 

 

The clock on the bedside table shows 7.43am.

Beside me, he stirs slightly, rolling over onto his side so that the sunlight falls onto his face. I wonder whether he knows – whether he sits up watching me blindly search for you in my dream. Whether he knows that when I wake up, your name will once again be bubbling on my lips.   
  
As I look at him with his hair falling into his eyes and the rise and fall of his chest, I think about that dream and I wonder if this is your idea of penance – to remind me that once upon a time, I promised  _I love you and only you. Forever and ever._  

Is this punishment that you orchestrated because I moved on, because I fell in love again? Because I replaced you when I promised  _forever and ever_?   
  
He frowns slightly and cracks open one eye. He sees me looking and smiles – heartbreaking and blinding like the sun. He reaches out for me and I let him pull me close for a kiss.   
  
When his lips find mine, I pray that he cannot taste your name on the corners of my lips. It will break him to know that I still cannot let go and it will kill me if his heart is broken. So where does that leave me now?  
  
He pulls away after a heartbeat and rests his forehead against mine. I can feel his eyelashes brushing my cheek and his hazel eyes are clear and bright. I feel like losing myself in their depths.   
  
“Morning,” he breathes, voice hoarse and crackly from sleep and he smiles at me again and it tugs at my heartstrings.  _I’m sorry._  
  
“Morning,” I answer.  
  
He gets up and walks over to the bathroom. I can see the taut line of his shoulders and the muscles ripple when he pulls his shirt off and then I’m thinking of you again.

Of days like this when I would sit on the bed and watch you pull your shirt off in the bathroom, a slight smirk on your face as you count down the seconds when I would slam you against the bathroom door and kiss you like my life depended on it. You always knew I would give in and even though the whole world thinks it’s the other way around, I’m still always the first to crack. 

 

 

The mattress dips a bit and he is reaching for my hand and pulling me to the bathroom with a playful grin. We always shower together the mornings after he sleeps over. It’s become a routine, something familiar, and something for me to hold on to and keep as a memory – to number as many as the ones I shared with you. 

He makes me sit on the closed lid of the toilet bowl and he peels off my clothes and directs me under the shower spray to wet my hair. He laughs when I shiver violently at the cold and curse at him. He tweaks the shower knob and tests the temperature with the back of his palm.

A minute later, he squeezes shampoo onto the palms of his hands and lathers it vigorously before putting it in my hair. He is gentle, even as his fingers massage the shampoo into my hair, his nails grazing my scalp.

He kisses me like that, with his hands still tangled in my hair and the soapsuds trailing down my face. 

 

 

You always liked to kiss me with teeth, that leaves my lips bruised and bleeding and then you’d kiss the blood away with your palm over my heart, your nails digging into my shirt. To everyone else, it looked like you were trying to gouge my heart out – you could have done that in a heartbeat and I wouldn’t have cared.   
  
I have no heart to yield anyway because you stole it from me the very moment we met – when you bumped into me outside a cafe. You mumbled sorry when I scowled at you and you dragged me inside for coffee – your idea of an apology. We spent hours talking and talking and at the end you laugh when you realized I still don’t know your name. You held out your hand for me to shake and said hello, tripping over the Korean syllables and you blushed when I imitated your accent and teased you all the way back to my apartment.  
  
When I look back now and think about it, truth is, you had me at hello. Had me falling head over heels with butterflies fluttering in my stomach – which, according to the rest of the world, means love. And so there I was, loving you – in love with you.   
  
And here I am now. Because love doesn’t walk away, love doesn’t leave. People do.

 

 

He coaxes my mouth open, gentle as always. The water is running down around us in rivulets like a miniature waterfall. It’s startlingly cold to the touch.   
  
It was raining too that day you left me and before I can stop them, tears are running freely down my cheeks to mingle with the water and disappear down the drain.  
  
He doesn’t ask about the salty taste in my mouth from the tears. He doesn’t ask when I pull him closer, when I grip his hips so tightly the porcelain skin bruises.

He doesn’t ask about you or whether I dreamt of you again last night. He doesn’t ask if I still think of you, if I still love you, if I’m imagining it is you kissing me now instead of him.

 

 

Later, I offer to make breakfast. He offers to help but I gently tell him there is no need. He nods and takes a seat on the sofa. There is a small nail on the wall directly above his head. I took down the picture that used to hang there a week after you left. The one with both us sitting on the front steps of this apartment – me leaning back against your chest with your arms around me protectively

At the threshold of the small kitchen, I take a deep breath before stepping in.

I need a minute to quell that ache in my chest. The pain is duller now, weathered by time but it is always there – a barely healed cut that leaves a scar on the inside walls of my heart.

From the living room, I hear the sounds of an old sitcom that he is watching.   
  
It's not politeness that makes me refuse his help. I’m being selfish really. I don’t want anyone to taint what little of your presence is left here, in this room. I don’t want anyone to take your place at the stove. I don’t want anyone to smudge the fingerprints you left on the handles of the pots and pans and the gleaming edges of the knife.  
  
As always, I burn myself with the hot edge of the pan, never quite learning how to toss the eggs just right like you used to do.

He comes running into the kitchen at my yelp and helps me to stick my hand under the tap. Slowly, lovingly, he caresses the wound and when he looks at me, there is too much understanding clouding his eyes.   
  
We order take out instead and I am selfishly glad he doesn’t ask the questions I see burning clearly in the dark pupils of his eyes.

He smiles at me over his coffee instead, brittle and a little frayed at the edges. The droop of his shoulders hurts me deeper than any burn from the frying pan.  _I’m sorry._

 

 

I met him in a bar 2 months after you left. He bought me a drink and introduced himself. I wasn’t interested – my mind, my heart, my soul is still all you. He took me home when I passed out from the alcohol and the sound of your voice telling me  _I love you._  
  
He stayed with me all through that night, sleeping on the floor beside the bed with his arms as a pillow. He didn’t leave even when I threw up all over his shirt the next morning.

Instead, he held my hair away from my face and rubbed my back and waited patiently until my stomach stopped heaving into the toilet bowl.  
  
He was the one who was there for the never-ending tears and the paroxysms of grief every time a memory resurfaced with one look at your shirt still hooked behind the door, your toothbrush still perched at the edge of the sink.

He was there on the days where I laid on the bed and stared into thin air unseeingly for hours on end. He was there when I raged at anything, at everything – mostly at God for taking you away. He was there to hold my hand and tuck me into bed and feed me chicken soup.

He was there to care for me when it became clear to anyone who can see, that I wasn’t able to care for myself.   
  
And when time healed the wounds, when it started hurting a lot less, he was there for that too.

 

 

Across from me, he drains his coffee and places the mug into the sink. I walk him out to the door and he kisses me goodbye – brief and affectionate and close-mouthed.   
  
“I’ll see you for dinner later?” he asks as he slips on his shoes.  
  
“Later,” I agree as he straightens up.  
  
His gaze lingers on the crescent shaped scar at the side of my neck – courtesy of the car crash that killed you 2 years ago. The one that almost killed me too.

He looks sad and wistful and suddenly I feel a need to explain, to make him understand.  
  
“Kibum, I –“  
  
He places a finger to my lips to silence me.

“Take your time to forget,” he says softly with a wry twist of his lips and I feel like crying for putting him through this pain that he does not deserve.  
  
He leans in and kisses my temple.

“I love you,” he says, walking away before I have a chance to say _I love you too_.  
  
I watch him walk down the street, his coat flapping in the wind and I think that I love him. I do. But I love you too.   
  
He disappears around the corner and all I can think of is how I don’t have enough strength in me to love and hold two separate hearts – the heart that belonged to you and the heart that is currently beating inside his chest. 

 


End file.
